When Finishing Is Worst than 5pm Traffic Jams

Printing has always been a key method of communication. Of course, the printing market has greatly evolved throughout the years, especially in the last decade where automation has slowly taken over the industry thanks to JDF and the role played by CIP3/CIP4. Now, automating is essential for printers to stay competitive and increase their productivity. While the main focus has been on automating prepress, the finishing and bindery has often been neglected. Nowadays, technology allows us to include bindery in the overall workflow automation system. We can now say that we’ve reached complete automation by presenting a touch-free printing production.

Automating finishing has many advantages such as: saving time and money, reducing costs and errors, eliminating waste, improving scheduling and resource management. All these reasons are good to generate customer satisfaction. Digital printing has given us the opportunity to produce new projects such as short-runs, targeted and personalized jobs, but the turnaround time between each job can take a lot of time at the end of each day. Allowing finishing equipment to be automated helps reduce the bottleneck during production and eventually compete with the continuously growing speed of presses. It is now possible to automate bindery by using software solutions such as Ultimate Bindery.

Ultimate Bindery is a JDF open server that enables a web-to-finish workflow. It operates as an agent between the prepress and postpress equipment in order to eliminate manual setups. Ultimate Bindery validates each job before printing in order to reduce the risks of errors. With this solution, employees are only needed when problems emerge or when the machine is out of ink or paper. This standalone software solution acts as a hub of knowledge between JDF imposed tickets and JDF finishing tickets. It is compatible with more than 19 drivers from 8 different manufacturers. It is also offered in six languages.

If your business relies on short-runs, web-to-print, hybrid printing, variable data printing, on demand books or transactional printing, Ultimate Bindery is the perfect solution to complete your workflow and eliminate bottleneck in the finishing department.